Palestinian militants tune in to President Obama’s Cairo speech in June

The Arabs: A History
By Eugene Rogan
Allen Lane £25, 600 pages;
Basic Books $35 (US)
FT Bookshop price: £20

It’s not pleasant being Arab these days,” wrote respected Lebanese writer Samir Kassir in an essay in 2005, shortly before he was murdered. “Feelings of persecution for some, self-hatred for others; a deep disquiet pervades the Arab world.”

Eugene Rogan’s modern history of the Arabs does not shy away from the challenging questions raised by Kassir. Indeed, the book starts with two murders in Lebanon of critics of Syrian hegemony that symbolise the tragic dilemmas of modern Arab politics. On February 14, Valentine’s Day 2005, former Lebanese prime minister and billionaire entrepreneur Rafiq Hariri was killed in a huge car bomb; and on June 2 of that year, Kassir himself was also assassinated, both for resisting Syrian power. Rogan, a lecturer at Oxford University, uses Kassir’s writings to points us toward the themes of this impressive book: “How has a living culture become discredited and its members united in a cult of misery and death?”

The author’s chief theme is the feeling of Arab powerlessness, and he cites another modern moment as emblematic of that idea: the occasion in December 2008 when Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zeidi tossed his shoes at president George W Bush. “Unable to achieve their aims in the modern world,” Rogan writes, “the Arabs see themselves as pawns in the game of nations, forced to play by other people’s rules.”

To explain this, Rogan believes: “Westerners need to pay far more attention to the way history has been experienced and understood by Arabs themselves: this could spare them not from repeating history so much as from repeating historic mistakes.” His book runs right up to the Iraq war, and ends with Barack Obama’s speech to the Arab world in Cairo in June this year. But by bringing history to the present day, there is always the risk that a historian is just too close to present events to bring analytical detachment: after all, how will the Iraq war appear in 10, let alone 20 years, and will Obama’s hopeful initiatives turn out to have any consequences at all?

Rogan avoids the temptation to blame everything on the crimes and lies of western powers when there isn’t a region of the world, including Europe itself, that hasn’t been conquered, tricked and exploited even in the 20th century. Indeed, his account of the feckless, corrupt leadership of the Arab world is as damning as that of western interference.

Once he has set the themes and questions, he plunges into a rich, galloping narrative that spans the Arab world from Morocco to Yemen and Iraq. Starting in 1517 with Selim the Grim, the Ottoman sultan who defeated the last Mamluk sultans to seize Egypt, Jerusalem and Mecca, the Arabs were ruled for the next 400 years from faraway Istanbul. But the Turks shared Islam and the Arabs joined the Ottomanist project.

The early years of Ottoman rule were competent, but in the 18th century the centre lost control to a series of local Arabic dynasties. Rogan brings to life the drama of the wars and ambitions of flamboyant characters such as Zahir al-Umar, the strongman of Galilee and Acre who dominated Palestine for 30 years, or the ruthless Mamluk adventurer Ali the Cloud-catcher, who ruled Egypt. Both of these leaders hubristically reached too high and were ultimately destroyed by Istanbul.

Rogan places Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt firmly in the western tradition of conquests of the Arab world dressed up as liberation. In the early 19th century, Muhammed Ali, the pasha of Egypt, created a new prototype: secular modernisation. He almost brought down the entire Ottoman empire but instead, pressured by the Great Powers, had to settle for hereditary rule in Egypt. In some ways, he opened up the Arab world to the flowering of culture in the late 19th century. But this was also the time when north Africa was being colonised by France and Britain so that, just as an early Arab sense of nation was developing, the European powers were tightening their grip.

Rogan shows how badly Britain and France mishandled the carve-up of the Middle East in 1918, making contradictory promises to the Arabs, the Jews and each other. But he shows equally how meagre were the achievements of the so-called Arab Revolt under the Hashemites and Lawrence of Arabia. The fall of the Ottoman empire created huge expectations – the dream of an Arabic kingdom, at least in Greater Syria, if not more widely – and then crushing disappointment.

Yet the new French and British colonies – the Mandates – along with the Balfour Declaration that promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, created modern Arab nationalism: ultimately Britain found Palestine impossible to rule, faced with Arab then Jewish revolts. Rogan exposes the ruthless rivalries, political follies and inept leadership of the Arab powers in the war against Israel in 1948 and after.

The third period of his history is the cold war, in which the Arabs were at least able to play off the superpowers. Here the book is dominated by Gamal Abdul Nasser, the charismatic Arab nationalist and president of Egypt who clumsily stumbled into the Six Day war of 1967, Israel’s ultimate victory. The last section covers the period of American domination culminating in the Iraq War and the rise of jihadi terror.

Rogan’s The Arabs: A History is an outstanding, gripping and exuberant narrative, full of flamboyant character sketches, witty asides and magisterial scholarship, that explains much of what we need to know about the world today.

Rogan believes Islamist parties would win any real election across the Arab world, and that Arabs have never been more depressed about the future. Yet he himself is more optimistic. “For the Arab world to break the cycle of subordination to other peoples’ rules will require a balanced engagement from the dominant powers of the age and commitment to reform within the Arab world itself,” he writes. “As the region moves from the under the shadow of the war on terror, the very beginnings of such a virtuous circle may be discerned.” Or is this another false dawn?

Simon Sebag Montefiore is writing a history of Jerusalem